Black exhibited this painting in her first solo exhibition at the Macquarie Galleries in Sydney in 1930. It stands out as one of her most exceptional and formally resolved still life paintings. Having studied with the cubist André Lhote in Paris, the work reveals her understanding of Lhote's compositional principles of a geometric order where the fractured planes of cubist construction were ultimately integrated into a rhythmically driven whole. Yet the work also indicates Black's own developing aesthetic of a modelled realism that recedes into fragmented abstraction. Using the compositional structure of the prism, Black beautifully synthesises a sense of the solidity of the still life objects within the composition's geometric construction, achieving a unified model of both weight and abstraction.

Frank Hinder's Tram kaleidoscope captures the essence of Sydney modernism. It synthesises elements of cubism, futurism and orphism to form an ambitious statement of the city as a dynamic, living organism. The painting is fragmented and presents simultaneous views of the tram and the outside street. Time and space are no longer linear and discreet, they have become intrinsically intertwined. The chaos, however, is ordered and unified by a repetition of forms. The cylindrical tram, distant buildings, a zooming car and crowd of anonymous commuters are integrated harmoniously into the composition.

The Gallery owns a number studies for this work from 1939, though the painting itself was not undertaken until after the Second World War. These works highlight Hinder's role, together with other Sydney contemporaries, in forming a distinct, innovative artistic vision: a modern art for a modern metropolis.

Mary Webb, who worked in Sydney and London in the 1940s in a figurative expressionist mode, travelled to Europe in 1949 and subsequently became a significant Australian abstractionist and collagist in Paris in the 1950s. Despite an active exhibition schedule in Paris, where her work attracted significant review, Webb maintained contact with Sydney constructivists Frank Hinder, Ralph Balson and Grace Crowley over this decade.

Joie de vivre was shown at Webb's solo exhibition at Galerie R Creuze in Paris, mounted only a month before her untimely death in December 1958. Webb's excursion into 'informel' abstraction in Joie de vivre, with its arresting sense of movement, pastel hues, and soft-edged cloud-like forms, represents the artist's most significant painterly achievement, and a singular contribution to Australian abstraction. This recent acquisition, newly rediscovered after over four decades in storage in Paris, is the most important of all currently known works by Webb.